Lee Bryant of Headshift, a scial software consulting firm, spoke of the death of traditional enterprise software and the rise of a new breed of social software that is attentuating the torrent of information within large companies.

The lost world of IT dinosaurs - legacy systems that are too big and expensive to kill

In the outside world - the dotcom bust swept away software 'predators' and people began constructing their own tools.

Humans are back - People found that if their systems all connected up, they could share stuff!

Fear, enterprise=expensive - Managers continue to buy arguments about process, workflow, security and control that software vendors use to keep them in the Stone Age...seeing IT as an enabler again.

Jen King's (Yahoo' Berkeleys Marc Davis is King's professor) session on RFID began with a review of first principles and the two basic RFID components - a tag/chip/smartcard and a reader, communicating through radio signals. Most current applications aren't consumer, but largely enterprise logistics, supply-chains and inventory control.

The US E-Passport (containing an ISO14443 contactless 64Kb smartcard) is to be issued by all US passport agencies by the end of 2006. By 2008, the US, Canada and Mexico will require E-Passports for travel. King reviews these examples rather than consumer applications, simply because they are live, have direct impact on people's lives and raise questions about some of the problems with RFID.

RFID was selected for the passport because of the difficulty to counterfeit, remote reading, inclusion of biometric data, ICAO adoption and heavy lobbying by the smartcard industry. Data is encrpyted, but not signed and includes some basic demographics and a JPG passport photo.

Security weakenesses with the E-Passport include skimming, eavesdropping and cloning. Originally the US State Department chose not to require encryption as information was in the printed copy anyway and encryption would require global infrastucture upgrades and slow the reading process. Following several studies and some criticism, State has now requied all E-Passports to include anti-skimming material, though this is problematic also and King recommends an anti-static bag! Also, numbers in the machine readable area are now scanned for use as a PIN to maintain the document's security.

Incidentally, of the 2'335 comments recieved, during the hearings on development of the passport, 98.5% were negative!

Despite these problems, RFID hacking is not as easy as might be imagined. ISO14443 readers and tags do not assert complete compatibility, read-range experiments (current ceiling is 69ft) are still in process and equipment is not portable. However, demand for this type of equipment is likely to increase and scanners can be located in fixed positions with high footfall, negating issues of portability.

RFDump.org's Lukas Grunwald has created an application that reads and writes RFID tags at 'Metro-Future' stores in the UK. In this store, Grunwald managed to swap the prices of cream cheese and DVDs!

The US-Visit I-94A forms, for transit through a land port, include an embedded RFID tag. Unfortunately, users have to hold the form in the window as the metallic body of the car blocks the signal, negating the value of a border system with faster throughput.

Both these case studies indicate that users, privacy impact and usability were considered as afterthoughts. IN the case of the E-Passport, throughput is actually slower than areas that utilise printed passports.

The ReadID Act of 2005 now requires that all ID issued by 2008 has to include a machine-readable technology, most likely RFID (though barcodes could be employed). Ironically, stronger ID won't prevent terrorism and makes ID theft more rewarding.

In conclusion, RFID-enabled products need to be designed with usability in mind and privacy/security concerns cannot be taken lightly. Notably, RFID can be implemented securely with minimal impact on privacy. Most worryingly, it seems RFID adoption and national ID cards in both the US and UK have been driven largely by collusion between the smartcard industry and foreign ministries, with little to no regard for user-centric design...this is borne out in examining public records on the development of ID cards and passports in both countries.

Mary Hodder's session on tagging and identity, builds on some of the work from the Identity 2.0 movement, proposing that tagging has value for annotating rich media. Technorati's tags provide a partial solution but doesn't address how people wish to include tags on their own site, but still participate in communities.

In usabilities, bloggers requested:

Trusted tags.

Tags that didn't require links.

Tags with flexibility to mobilise tags from the issuing site.

Visibility vs. everybody.

Make their own tag clouds for their blogs.

Easier, automated systems.

Tagging objectgs separately from other posts.

65% of Technorati tags are drawn from blog categories, running to about 10m a month. User's of Hodder's own Dabble.com tag around 53%of their content. Media from third-parties tends not to be tagged - also the richer the media, the closer to 100% the tagging draws.

Dabble users tend to look at tags and the duration of video clips in order to make decisions about whether to view the content.

In examining the question of whether publishers shoul offer full or partial feeds, Lunt relates that full feeds are out-subscribed by partial feeds by an order of ten. However, partial feeds grow at the same pace and experiements in reducing the content of a feed don't substantially alter click-through-rates to the parent site.

Lunt recommends that publishers focus on items rather than feeds. Filtering of content by tags and searches drives and increases item-level distribution.

In 2004, several hundred clients expanded to a thousand clients in 2005 and tnow thousands of clients today. The progression from aggregators to filters, browsers and now AJAX home pages is continuing - the proliferation of readers is not leading to consolidation, but driving innovative approaches, indicating the market is still to play for,

Subscriptions are growing to the point where feeds are becoming the principal mode of interaction with web content. This indicates that understanding the consumption of feeds, their content, audience, distribution, aggregation and usage is also growing in importance.

Jointly presented by Meetro and PlaceSite, this session explored various locative media developments. The central question posed, 'Who are you NOT meeting right now?', is particularly appropriate to the conference environment.

Location as a principal factor is deconstructed as one of the driving factors in community. Regarless of the mediated nature of networked communities, physical presence and location largely shape our participation in the places we work, live and play. Interestingly, realtime social networks with a community dimension were seen as a critical carrier of locative media in the future.

Interestingly, IBM's experience of collaborative media in the enterprise has been very successful, but organising locative meetings, even in the same city, required ad-hoc organisational mechanisms that didn't exist - Meetro addressed this need for IBM.

Meetro has become a 'neighbourly' tool, enabling people within proximity to share resource - can i borrow your vacuum?

Amongst the lessons learned by PlaceSite and Meetro in launching their services:

Absolute location shouldn't be revealed; abstracting to a radial 'aura' around an actual location is more desirable.

Where Meetro is tied to the person, Placesite is largely linked to actual locations - this is a useful distinction in models pursued by various locative media.

Placesite's location-centric approach enables existing social boundaries to be extended into locative media and ensures an intrinsic community is related to an actual location. Placesite also offers router code which can PlaceSite-enable a WiFi hotspot; partnerships are in place with wireless providers Sputnik and Wavestorm.

Longer term plans for PlaceSite include plans to address housing developments, conferences, muniwireless zones, an open API and the general transformation into a platform and network provider.

As we consider FON-enabled Wanadoo Liveboxes to create a public wireless network for Wanadoo broadband subscibers, a Livebox+FON+PlaceSite combination offers a more compelling user proposition. Each Livebox could be transformed into a hub for local users, advertising, organisations, media and companies.

A Wanadoo Placebox could illuminate neighborhoods with connectivity and information - a digital lamppost!

Communities occur when people have the ability to use their voice in a public and immediate way, forming intimate relationships over time.

Web 1.0 communities were the era of company towns. You can use you voice, but only within the format and rules of the bossman...The Well, Salon Table Talk, Builder Buzz. The new generation of communities are increasingly self-powered and independent...Dooce, Kottke, BoingBoing. The differentiator is no-one can turn the new generation of communities off.

There is a connective tissue that is powering distributed communities - blogs, comments, trackbacks, tags, APIs, blogrolls, referrers and links. Third party aggregators such as Technorati, Bloggies, Photoblogs.org and ORblogs also have significance in the connectivity between communities. Indeed, this tissue forces better behaviour of all particpants in an extended community.

Memes are increasingly the fabric of communities online - where user contributions might lie buried within a forum post, connective tissue is enabling memes to spread further and wider, outside the constituencies where they would previously have remained...SelfPortraitday.com, Whiskerino, BlogThis quizzes.

However, with no centralised authority, moderation, community scale that exceeds the personal and complex tools, the new generation of communities are creating their own problems.

Playsh is a 'narrative-driven "object navigation" client, operating primarily on the semantic level, casting your hacking environment as a high-level, shell-based, social prototyping laboratory, a playground for recombinant network toys.'

More literally, playsh is a command-line interface that uses MUD and text adventure conventions to navigate and manipulate the web. Features include:

looking for patterns in source code.

navigating URLs geographically through 'rooms' or as a deck of cards in your hand (!)

opening feed items as 'doors'.

Superficially, playsh appears to be a command-line interface for the web, though lacking the intuitive nature of YubNub, though Yubnub does lack the ability to pipe data from one silo into another. Though Webb's motivations for exploring recombinant interfaces and playful metaphors are appropriate and valuable, playsh itself doesn't seem to address these motivations.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it's difficult to see the value here...